Two gaming developments in Las Vegas and Chinese-speaking staff are becoming more common in the gambling Mecca as gaming operators increasingly target Chinese and Asian visitors.
The Lucky Dragon Hotel & Casino is slated to open in early 2017 and is the first ground-up casino development in Las Vegas since the Great Recession.
The new resort is located on Sahara Avenue between I-15 and the Las Vegas Strip, and is small by Las Vegas standards, with about 200 rooms and a 27,000-square-foot casino.
North American-based Chinese visitors are the primary target demographic, but it also seeks to make Chinese visitors feel at home in the U.S., with signs featuring Chinese characters, with English appearing in smaller print.
Feng Shui experts, a Chinese-themed interior with lots of lucky red, and authentic Chinese dishes are to be served at the resort, and help to ensure cultural harmony for Chinese visitors.
The Lucky Dragon also announced its first slate of restaurants serving authentic Chinese foods.
Dragon’s Alley is themed after the Ghost Street night markets in Beijing, Taipei, and elsewhere, and will be lit by lanterns. Fare will vary from morning to night. Menus will rotate and are to include dim sum, live seafood, Asian barbecue, boba tea, and other traditional Chinese foods and drinks.
The Dragon’s Alley show kitchen is called the Jewel Kitchen and will extend into the gaming area to entertain casino guests while preparing various delicacies.
Fine dining is to be provided by the Phoenix restaurant, which will seat 60 and offer contemporary Chinese dishes, including Kurbuta pork, abalone, and deer tendon.
Dim sum fans can sample live seafood and other fares at the Pearl Ocean, while Bao Now will feature quick items for fast eating, including dim sum, noodles, rice, soups, and congee.
The Cha Garden will offer indoor and outdoor seating in a lounge and tea garden that will be open around the clock and offer yum cha and sommelier-approved teas.
While the Lucky Dragon is the first Las Vegas casino to provide an exclusively Chinese experience, it will have competition from the massive Resorts World Las Vegas project underway near the Lucky Dragon.
Located west of the former Riviera casino site, Genting Berhad has gotten underway on its $4 billion Resorts World Las Vegas project, which will be an Asian-themed resort when it is scheduled to open in about three years.
Wynn Resorts and Las Vegas Sands, both of whom have large gaming operations in Macau, have been catering to Chinese and other Asian visitors for several years.
Those resorts, though, generally cater only to extremely wealthy Chinese visitors, while the Lucky Dragon is looking to become the go-to place for U.S.-born and based Chinese gamblers who aren’t rich but still have money to spend and don’t want an experience largely designed for the majority of middle class white visitors who frequent Las Vegas the most.
Growing international travel, though, will require more airline routes from Asia to Las Vegas. So far, there only is one.
Hainan Airlines awaits final approval from U.S. regulators to begin flying from Beijing to Las Vegas three times per week starting in December. The only other direct route from Asia to Las Vegas is Korean Airlines’ Seoul to Las Vegas route.
The lack of direct routes from Asian locales to Las Vegas makes it difficult to track arrivals from China and other locales, as most Asian visitors arrive first at an airline hub in the U.S. and then board planes for Las Vegas, or drive.
Current tracking largely is dependant upon arrivals at McCarran International Airport, but that causes many Chinese visitors to be undercounted, especially is they landed in Los Angeles and drove to Las Vegas.
Meanwhile, Crown Gaming says it has not given up on its proposed $2 billion Alon Las Vegas resort and casino on the north end of the Las Vegas Strip and located west of Wynn Resorts.
Alon Las Vegas CEO Andrew Pascal says a recent sale of Crown Gaming shares by principal owner James Packer won’t impact the project, but obtaining financing for the project is “complicated.”
